Your job is to create subtitles that are ready for audiences to view them. Look over your subtitles and fix mistakes before submitting them in the editor. Do not rely on reviewers to fix your errors or make your subtitles high-quality.
Research factual information and content like names of locations and people, quotes, lyrics, poems, historical facts, and other information relevant to the video. For example, videos about information technologies usually have certain words that may have a special meaning in that field.
Subtitles should represent the meaning of audio. Do not add extra content unless explicitly required for assignments. Do not include filler words like “um” “ah”.
Maximum characters per line: 42 for most languages and 25 for Japanese, Korean and Chinese (all variations)
Maximum lines per subtitle: 2
Example:
And I think it's just important that you know this
↓
And I think it's just important
that you know this
Read your subtitles out loud, pausing at each line break.
To insert a line break in a subtitle, type SHIFT + ENTER
Do not end a sentence and start a new sentence in the same line.
Avoid unbalanced lines. The shorter line should be at least half the length of the longer one. Divide the captions in a different way if it is difficult to preserve grammatical units without having unbalanced line lengths.
Break a line
after punctuation marks
before conjunctions
before prepositions
Do not separate
first and last names of people
an article or adjective from its noun
a verb from its subject noun
prepositional phrases
a verb from an auxiliary, reflexive pronoun, or negation
infinitives ("to be", "not to be")
Grammatical units are combinations of words that belong together. Do not leave connecting words at the end of a line or start a new sentence in the middle of a line.
A grammatical unit can be made up of
Connecting words (preposition, conjunctions, auxiliary verb)
Core words (noun or verb)
Modifiers (adjectives or adverbs).
Minimum duration of subtitles on screen is 1 second. Do not divide the subtitles in parts that are too small. Merge subtitles if you have many short subtitles in a row.
Maximum duration of subtitles on screen is 7 seconds. Consider splitting the subtitle in two if it lasts close to the maximum duration.
Maximum delay between the audio and subtitle is 0.5 seconds. The subtitle should end as close as practical to the end of the speech.
Characters per second (cps) should be low enough for audiences to read. Check the characters per second in the information tray to the right of the active subtitle entry. Split or merge subtitles to keep cps in a reasonable range for the content. Most videos should have between 8 and 25 cps.
When transcribing subtitles, on-screen texts that are in the same language as the main audio should not be transcribed.
When translating subtitles, only include on-screen texts that are essential to the plot. Do not include on-screen text that is in your subtitle language, since your audience should be able to read it on their own.
Headline of a newspaper that the camera focuses on to give information to the audience
Location signs for a town, country, place of business
Street signs or important warning notices
Title cards that show a transition or the passing of time
If the on-screen text is too long to fit in one subtitle, distribute it into several subtitles.
Use a dialog hyphen character at the start of each line (-)
Separate the hyphen and the speech with one space
Each speaker should have one line
- How old are you?
- Ninety years old!
If a line ends with a URL, username, or other proper nouns that have special characters, leave out additional punctuation at the end of the line. The extra period or other punctuation could confuse the person watching the final video or give them an error if they try copying and pasting from your subtitles.
Examples:
Someone could copy and paste the URL including the ending punctuation:
✘ Check out my blog at www.bloghost.com/sampletext!
✓ Check out my blog at www.bloghost.com/sampletext
Use three periods (... ) to mark an ellipsis when a speaker trails off, leaves a gap in speech, or continues talking after someone else interrupts them. Don't use ellipsis for speakers interrupting themselves with parenthetical statements.
If a speaker is interrupted, mark the interruption with a double hyphen (-- ) with a space after the last hyphen. Do not insert a space before the double hyphen.